[SatNews] At a public event on October 25th at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), a professional society of astronauts and cosmonauts, issued a challenge to the global community to take the next vital steps to confront the threat from dangerous asteroids.

The ASE Committee on Near-Earth Objects statement follows the United Nations General Assembly adoption of a suite of proposals to create an international decision-making mechanism for planetary asteroid defense.

Five notable astronauts from three nations joined Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Frederick P. Rose Planetarium, in a discussion of planetary defense from asteroids centering on the ASE statements. Speakers included: Veteran US NASA Astronaut Tom Jones, current chairman of the ASE NEO Committee, and senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition; veteran US Apollo 9 Astronaut Rusty Schweickart, ASE founder and co-founder and chairman emeritus of B612 Foundation; Dumitru-Dorin Prunariu, veteran Romanian Astronaut and vice president of the European International Institute for Risk, Security and Communication Management; Soichi Noguchi, engineer and current Astronaut of the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, and Dr. Edward Lu, veteran US NASA Astronaut, 7-month resident of the International Space Station (ISS) and co-founder and CEO of the B612 Foundation.